


Does She Know That We Bleed The Same?

by th_esaurus



Category: Edge of Tomorrow (2014)
Genre: F/M, Pining, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-25
Updated: 2018-12-25
Packaged: 2019-09-05 01:11:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,737
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16800709
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/th_esaurus/pseuds/th_esaurus
Summary: The official statement is still that nobody knows what happened in Paris. Nobody knows how the mimics destroyed themselves. Cage is quite happy to toe that line.





	Does She Know That We Bleed The Same?

**Author's Note:**

  * For [neutrophilic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/neutrophilic/gifts).



> Thank you to all the usual suspects who let me wail about this at them. Thank you to my recipient for finally getting me to write about these characters I adore.

He would’ve been good at this, yesterday.

But yesterday was a long time ago.

*

They call it Trident; a three-pronged attack. Volunteer numbers were rising right until the day the mimics died; the sharpest drop-off they’ve seen the entire campaign. But celebrations are short-lived. There’s work to do, and the clean up op is huge and unglamorous. There’s a shadow of fear across Europe that this isn’t over, that the mimics will respawn as they have a hundred times before. But Cage knows it’s done. As surely as he knows his own name.

As surely as he knows Rita’s middle name is—

The only recognition she gives him is a wary glance before her brisk handshake. The Major who tracked her down at Dover. She didn’t know him then, and he has no plans to convince her otherwise. He’s had the privilege of spending a lifetime with her, and she had, for the vast majority of it, loathed him. Without use, without purpose, he’s nothing to her. He has no deep yearning to examine that, it’s just the way of things. He’d been a louche man in his younger days, handsome and bright-smiled, chasing after girls who’d turned him down twice, both because he liked the challenge and could practice a slick line or two that he’d spin, later, into a saucy slogan plastered on billboards across LA and New York.

He used to be good at this.

Rita is recalcitrant. She’s a soldier, not a mouthpiece, and the whole idea is distasteful to her. She’d loathed her sainthood after Verdun, her image slapped on buses and buildings like some antihero pin-up. “You used me to drag men and women into a war we never won,” she tells him, angry, when he invites her to spearhead their European victory tour.

The official statement is still that nobody knows what happened in Paris. Nobody knows how the mimics destroyed themselves. Cage is quite happy to toe that line.

“People want heroes,” Cage tries. “They need them. And whether you like it or not, you’re as close as they’ve got. After Verdun—”

She spits. “Verdun was—”

“A feint, I know,” he says, moving on fast before she can ask why he knows. “But this mess is real, and we need hands on deck. A month, less than that; three cities, that’s all. I swear.”

She refuses, of course.

Her superior officer orders it done.

Cage forgot what it was to be listened to, and remembers why he liked it.

He’s a stranger to her. Above her but only in rank, not experience. A coddled ad man who’s never been part of a front line, never even brought up the rear shaking and shitting himself; his only experience with a gun was visiting country cousins in podunk middle America and shooting cans off fences with a BB. That’s what she must think.

On paper, it’s the truth, and he leans into that for the greater good. Plays his part, like an actor treading the boards again after a long retirement.

Still, sometimes he forgets his lines. There is something mistrustful in the way she watches him.

**Paris.**

He watches her, on the flight to Paris. First class, a private jet, a misstep that puts her ill at ease. She’s used to mud and military, drills, training, dragging her Jacket across miles of razed earth. Not sitting cross-legged in a plush chair, coasting above the French countryside. It was, believe it or not, a necessity - almost all the local military transport was grounded at Dover, or destroyed in pockets of war-scorched terrain across Europe, and the UDF had got desperate, gone to Commons, brayed and begged for some kind of mandatory surrender of private-owned aircraft: tourist choppers, pimped out private jets, sad little biplanes. Cage hadn’t exactly complained.

He knows he shouldn’t stare at her, but it’s been so long since he had the chance.

When food arrives, she eats the almond croissant, pours sugar into her black coffee, and touches nothing else. Her sweet tooth. He smiles to himself.

“Yes?” she snaps.

“You have something on your face,” he says, but doesn’t reach out to brush the pastry crumb off the corner of her lip. Just watches her scrub at her face with the back of her palm. Then she gets up, doesn’t bother with an excuse as to where she’s going, and leaves the cabin. She doesn’t come back until they reach Charles de Gaulle. Not exactly a lot of airspace traffic these days, he thinks, remembering a business trip to Paris a decade back - late morning meetings, late night wine bottles - as they land on the empty runway.

*

First, the clean up.

A PR gimmick, realistically, but he wanted to ease her into this trip. Let her work with her hands, he’d bargained with the UDF’s upper echelons. She’ll ignore the cameras if she’s hauling her weight.

The Louvre is still a wreck; a tangled mess of mimic bodies, water, stone, glass, blood. The corpses of the men had long ago been removed, but they had all been near-dissolved in the sonic wave that stopped the mimics dead: trickling flesh, disintegrated uniforms, skeletons still in their outsized Jackets. Their names, from dented dog-tags, were withheld from the public. Cage, of course, knows them all. Ford, Griff, Kimmel. Skinner.

Rita doesn’t know any of them. Secluded from the rest of the camp at Dover. The Full Metal Bitch. Why would she know any of lowly J Squad?

She does ignore the cameras, but it’s not exactly the stunt they had planned. Rita shuns the thick gloves and gas-mask they give her - mimic bodies still so much a scientific unknown - insists on her own chopper blade, shipped over with them from the base, and gets to hacking the bodies into parts, kicking them aside with her boot like debris. It’s grim work and she takes to the task with gusto. Cage, to his chagrin, is given bagging equipment and trails after her, along with a pack of biology interns from the old School of Medicine, before it was destroyed, shovelling mimic limbs and severed heads into white plastic bags for decontamination and dissection.

He’s seen them this close up plenty of times, but there’s always an eerie sense of anticipation about a dead mimic. As though they’ll rev up at any moment, all jerking limbs and freeze-frame stop-motion, prominent veins coursing with blood that has the power to change worlds.

Cage grabs a dismembered tentacle and shoves it ungracefully into a body bag.

Rita speaks to no-one. Grunts and sweats with the effort of the work. They were meant to set up a photo, Rita, triumphant, her chopper blade at her side, looking above the horror, across the broken remains of the Louvre, and out to the sky: a new dawn for humanity.

She will not do it, and he does not ask her. Just shuffles the camera men around to get a decent angle while she works. Candid always feels more personal, he tells them apologetically.

She’s spattered with blue mimic blood by the end of it, and there’s nowhere to shower until they reach their hotel. A rugged B&B outside the city, run by an old couple who’d refused to evacuate; conjoined rooms, lace on the pillows. He can hear the hiss of the water through the paper-thin walls, and it goes on for a long time.

When was the last time she had a hot shower? Never in his company.

Once, just once, they had slept in the farmhouse. There were three bedrooms, plenty of space, but she said it was stupid to split up; they’d take the master bedroom and keep watch in shifts on a battered wicker chair, covered in a dusty blanket and embroidered cushions. Two hours apiece should do it. He had not disagreed.

Their Jackets stood immobile in the corner of the room, like useless vanguards. The chair was positioned to overlook the open door, out to the landing and staircase and the front window, darkness looming out over the flat fields, all either bereft of crops or mazes of dead vines, and across to the strip of tarmac, the unlit lights along the highway; the first thing to vanish from view was the sunset.

But Cage spent his first stint watching nothing but Rita. Even in sleep she looked calculating, closed. There was a wisp of hair trailing across her forehead and down to her mouth, and it caught her breath every time she sighed out. Carefully, he stood, bracing himself on the arms of the chair to muffle its creaking, and padded across the floorboards. He didn’t dare perch on the edge of the bed. Just crouched beside her, and brushed that hair back from the root so it wouldn’t disturb her.

She didn’t wake. And they were attacked that night from the decimated back fields, four mimics slicing through the walls of the house. They had hidden under the bed, Rita trying to shield Cage with her body, but the mimics trashed the room without care, and when they crawled free, Rita had two wooden slats from the bedframe sticking out of her back where they’d sheared straight through her skin. Bubbling blood from the wounds.

Anyway, she died, and Cage used her pistol to—

He knocks on her hotel door, puts on his most winning smile. It never worked on her, but he still wants to try. “Fancy a nightcap?” he says, as though there’s a bourgeois bar waiting for them down the hall.

She looks at him like he’s trash.

“Goodnight, Major,” she says, even as she’s closing the door.

The second day is worse. There’s a rally at the remains of the Tower. He wrote a speech for her - knows her inflection and vocabulary so intimately that he thinks she might even be impressed and use it, but it remains in her back pocket, untouched. She stands too far back from the mic so nobody can hear her except for the translator - male - they’d booked at the last minute; the event was too well-publicised, too many people, too far back. It’s drizzling rain, overcast and grey, the crowd shivering, confused, in noisy macs and with battling umbrellas. Rita looks haggard in the foggy rain, her hair straggly, her body armour oily. He’d meant her to look commanding, an Amazon above the wreckage, as though she could rebuild the city with her bare hands; but instead she looks small, dwarfed by the mangled iron. She keeps saying she doesn’t know why she’s here and she doesn’t have anything noble or inspiring to say. That she was just doing her job. She doesn’t say it with pride. She sounds bitter.

Like she failed even at that.

A voice yells out above the grumbling masses. “ _C’est des conneries!_ ”

It’ll be a great line for the papers the next day, Cage thinks wryly.

She is livid at him when they return to their rooms. She asks, unkindly, if their host has anything to drink, and, being Parisian, the old woman takes no offence. Finds a cloudy glass a pours a finger of hoarded scotch into it for her. Rita downs it, and asks for another. Cage tries to join her.

“Major Cage,” she says, short, “I’m here because I was ordered to be, not because I want to be. Don’t babysit me. Don’t pal up to me. Let’s get this done, and get it over with, so we can get back to what we do best.” She looks him up and down. “Whatever that might be.”

His job is supposed to be helping her. That’s all he can remember being good at.

*

He can hear her working out through the wall, pushing her body to the point of pain, far past sundown. He remembers once—

She pulled her calf muscle. There was a mimic about a mile in from the road, lying low in the cornfields, and Cage knew the batteries on their Jackets would give out before they reached it. They must’ve made more noise than usual, because it ambushed them as Rita was clambering out of the boots, and she caught her ankle on the metal frame, twisted awkwardly, landed on the vines and shot upwards, three bullets straight through the mimic’s neck. It curled away instantly like a dead insect, and did not move again.

“Sloppy,” she spat as Cage helped her up.

“It’s usually slower than that,” he grumbled.

“So get us out of the Jackets sooner.”

“Oh, I’ve tried,” he said, “and you tell me we’d be idiots to abandon them until the last possible second.”

“So try harder,” she shrugs. Like anything with Rita was as easy as that.

She could put enough weight on her foot that he convinced her not to shoot him there and then. That they should at least try for the farmhouse. She lay face down on the sofa, springs creaking, and rolled up her trouser leg to the knee, baring the bruising skin, and told him what to fetch and carry. There was ice in the freezer and tea-towels folded neatly in a drawer, and he held the ice-packed cloth against her calf until it started to melt.

“Make a fist,” she instructed.

He did, holding it up in demonstration. Exhaustion made him playful, if only to stay awake.

“Roll your knuckles along the muscle, up and down. Rock your fist forward, finger to knuckle. Knead it. That’s—” She hissed at his first try. “No, more like—”

She grabbed his wrist and showed him what she meant. She was not gentle so neither was he, and she braced herself against the rough massage.

“Better?” He asked.

“No,” she snapped, and then she softened. It was those moments he lived for. “No, but it’ll help.”

She discovered the chopper in the backyard just before sunset, and just like every time before, the noise of the takeoff brought three mimics crashing down on them—

At least that time they both died. He woke up at boot camp before he could see, again, her bloodied, unmoving face. Her broken neck.

*

Every night in France, she wants to be left alone to drink and sulk.

“Sergeant Vrataski,” he starts—

He wonders if he should tell her. Something. Everything.

“—Don’t burn too much midnight oil,” he says. “Get some sleep.”

She starts in on her second scotch and doesn’t bother to reply.

**Germany.**

He had always planned Stuttgart as a respite from publicity, but she badly needs it. That bullshit speech is plastered across the news, social media. Still, there’s defences too, admiration for her as a soldier. The violence of how she dealt with the mimic corpses gained respect in unhealthy corners. The slightest uptick in volunteers over the next few days.

Stuttgart was for Rita, though. A military base, barely even German, nine in ten voices in the room American. They’d taken heavy hits in Germany. A lot of damage to survey. Troops needed on the ground out of a populace who’d tried to distance themselves from war. The great American PR machine trying and failing to drum up support.

The base had been abandoned for months, only recently swept clean and back in use. The zoo, nearby, had been destroyed in the fighting, but mimics had no interest in anything other than the dominant species; Cage had heard that the zoo’s big cats had wandered the wreckage of the city for weeks, browsing on rotted meat in abandoned charcuteries and butcher’s shops, and on the myriad corpses left lying in the streets. The three local lions had appropriated one corner of the base, squeezing in through the crippled fencing and using it like a cavern. Of course, prey dried up in the wake of the mimic scourge. When the Americans flew back in to start the clean-up op, they found two lions dead and almost sheer skeleton, and the third, a female, dead-eyed and panting, ribs like an Egon Schiele sketch, too far gone even to lunge at the smell of fresh meat. They put her down with a bullet between the eyes.

A couple of the troops had started calling the base _Löwenherz._ Cage liked the sound of that, and got a few of the publications covering the victory tour to run with the headline _Rita the Lionheart_.

“Don’t they have enough stupid nicknames for me already?” Rita said, unimpressed.

Ever since the mimics went down, there’d been a concerted effort to get scientists out of weapons development and back into the lab. Finally, _finally,_ there was some official rumble about mimic biology, about a species-wide interconnected nervous system, an ‘omega’ brain. Nothing yet about time travel in the public sphere but privately, in Whitehall corridors, Cage knew that whispers were flying back and forth about the mimics’ uncanny insight being less to do with tactical prowess than some kind of literal foresight.

Rita, he knew, was abreast of this gossip.

Cage was happy to act dumb.

He hovered at the side of the room while she tried to make herself heard among the chatter of middle-aged military men. Arguing over whether burning an alpha would cause the hundred thousand nearby betas to shrivel to ash, thus saving hours and hours of manpower.

“They’re connected psychically, not physically,” Rita kept saying. Even if they found an alpha - now that the mimic corpses were all contorted and grey, they had only size to gauge it on, and nobody wanted to traipse around Europe with a tape-measure - it would be a waste of time. They should barrel on methodically, razing the ground acre by acre.

We can’t know for sure, she’s told. Not quite dismissive, but. Dismissed.

“I have to agree with Sergeant Vrataski,” Cage pipes up from the back of the room. All heads turn but it’s Rita’s eyes that bore into him. Cage doesn’t falter. He’s sold far harder pitches to worse men. CEOs, CFOs, politicians. “Looking for alphas among the wreck would be like panning for gold - I’ve heard the numbers, something like one in 6.18 million, and with no guarantee of speed or success?” He shrugs, smiling coyly. “Gentlemen. Let’s focus on making _real_ headway, not cheap shots at easy wins.”

There are murmurs of grumbling assent.

And Rita is staring at him like she has never seen him before in her life.

*

They’re sleeping on base, cot beds in the old dorms, too close to other men for raised voices, so Rita’s is little more than a hiss.

“How did you know?” she says, as soon as they’re alone. Not cornering him physically, but with her gaze.

He tries to look nonchalant. “It’s my job, Sergeant, to keep up with the stats the UDF is pumping out—”

“No,” she says immediately. “No, I’ve read those reports. There was nothing about the numbers, nothing that precise.”

He barely pauses. He doesn’t want the truth to tumble out here, like this, when she’s this livid. “You’re not my only concern, Sergeant. I’ve been liaising with Doctor Carter, back in Dover; his work with mimic biology is unparalleled—”

“Don’t,” she spits. “Don’t talk to me about Carter like I don’t know him.”

He hates to see her this distraught. Control is everything to her, self-discipline, the only thing that kept her sane through the long, relentless slog of that ugly repeated day - and likely the only thing that kept him sane, too, on his ride of the carousel. If she hadn’t told him to find her when he woke up—

“Rita,” he says gently. “I’m just doing my job. Just like you. Let’s get through this.”

She grabs her personals off her bed, hefts the bag on her shoulder.

“Don’t call me by my name,” she says. “Ever again.”

He doesn’t stop her from leaving. It’s not like there isn’t enough space on the threadbare base for her to put distance between them, if that’s what she wants.

When she was training him - those endless, aching days when he knew he’d never be quick enough or strong enough or bold enough for what she needed; little better as a squire than Sancho Panza, only good with words, not weapons, and even then, not good enough to talk his way out of this sorry situation - back then, he’d slept mainly in a cluttered storeroom a few doors down from her quarters. He couldn’t slink back to J Company, not without Sergeant Farell’s swift retribution, and there was no question of him bunking with her. For some reason, he’d accepted this state of existence without argument. Every fresh cycle, they’d drag a mattress down the corridor to the store room, dump a few blankets for him, and within minutes of laying his head down, he’d be asleep; only to have her wake him with a rough kick at 5am the next morning to train, fight, strategise all over again.

It must be his body clock that wakes him around five now; just before. Dark and quiet on base, a pair of footsteps marching in the distance: prowling guardsmen.

Rita is sitting on the cot opposite him, with her pistol in her hand. It’s uncocked and her forefinger is nowhere near the trigger, but the hairs on the back of his neck stand at once. She is a dangerous woman, and he knows it well. A hundred memories of that pistol discharging between his eyes.

“I called Doctor Carter,” she says, horribly quiet. “He’s never even heard of a _Major William Cage.”_

The silence between them is long and increasingly uncomfortable. Cage shifts under the scratchy sheets. Rita doesn’t move. Barely blinks.

“The war never quite made it to America,” she says, not a question. “There were always rumours about pro-mimic factions over there. Evangelicals, anarchists. Fanatics who thought the world needed _cleansing.”_

Cage balks for a second, and then can’t help a snort of laughter.

She’s on him at once, her pistol under his chin. Her trigger finger no longer a safe distance.

“I’m not a spy,” he stammers immediately, his hands raised in nervy submission. “I’m—Christ, I’m not a spy, I’m—I was _you.”_

She doesn’t frown, but he can see in her eyes that she doesn’t comprehend.

“I was you,” he says, carefully, “before Verdun.”

He lets her process it. The flit of her eyes across his face, as though she’s looking for a physical sign, some remnant of alpha blood on his skin or the inky blackness of the visions behind his eyes. There’s nothing, of course. The power is long gone. And she realises that with a dull acceptance.

Even if he was special once, he isn’t any longer.

She untucks her pistol from the soft flesh under his jaw. Holsters it, steps back, looks down at him.

“Did you fall in love with me?”

His heart punches against his chest. “Sergeant, that’s—”

“Did you fall in love with me when I told you not to?”

He’d rather say nothing than lie.

Into the silence, she scoffs, almost spitting. “That explains a lot,” she says, and doesn’t look back as she leaves the room.  


**London.**

He tells her most everything on the flight back to London. A commercial airbus, this time, plastered with gaudy logos across the wing and tail. He tells the crew to go wild in first class, but keeps Rita in empty economy - after a shaky test run in Paris, he explains ruefully, Ms Vrataski wants to practice her speech without much of an audience - and just lets it all rush out. It’s a relief, to say it, but hearing it aloud, he knows Rita is the only person he’ll ever discuss this with. He sounds—crazed. War-stricken.

She listens with a blank, distant expression. Calculating, but taking every word in at least.

It’s true, he realises dully - more like confirmation of what he’d always expected. What use is any of this information to her? What use is he to her now? He robbed her of the victory she worked so tirelessly to win, and though he knows the end of the war, by any means, was always her ultimate goal, it must sting that she can remember nothing of it. Just second hand news from a man she cannot respect.

He does not tell her that she kissed him.

He does not tell her that her lips were chapped and dry and dust-covered, and that the kiss was borne of pity, and that the girl he’d kissed last before her called him _Bill, oh, Bill—_ and that he thinks about Rita’s mouth on his every day, and can’t even remember the other woman’s name.

She had called him a good man, but Cage isn’t so sure.

He’s quiet, when he finishes: that alien-smelling blood flooding his mouth and nose in the cesspits under the broken Louvre. He’s quiet; she’s quiet.

After a long time, Rita shifts in her chair to get comfortable. “None of it’s worth anything now,” she says. “Is it?”

He did not expect thanks, but it stings anyway.

*

The parade takes the same route as the 2003 Rugby World Cup celebrations, a little bit of trivia that the punters liked but that Rita has little reaction to, when Cage tells her. They’d commandeered one of the buses from Dover, with her money shot plastered on the side (Cage had suggested the photoshoot, but had not been present on the day; he remembers seeing the photos and snorting, “You couldn’t get her to smile once?”) - the _Full Metal Bitch_ graffiti had been hastily scrubbed the night before, leaving only a reddish smudge. The top had been sliced open like a tin can, roughly daubed with sealant, and the driver instructed to go no faster than 10mph under any circumstance.

An open-topped carriage for a ceremonial parade. Rita Vrataski, London-born, a local girl done good.

“Wave,” Cage begs her. “You don’t even have to smile.”

She doesn’t wave, but it does not matter. The crowd is out in droves: some curious to see how she’ll perform, some here for a party, and some who’ve come in genuine gratitude, for Rita and the troops she represents. It doesn’t matter to most that the war ended without being won: it was, at least, not lost.

It’s strange to be back in London after the apocalypse of mainland Europe. They had flown over the white, chalky cliffs at Dover and, as they dropped altitude, the squall in the water turned out not just to be waves. Hundreds of thousands of mimic corpses bobbing in the sea, knocking chunks of stone off the cliffs, and, where the rock-face was least steep, a huge piling tower of them, clambering desperately up towards the green, green grass of home: the tip of the mimic spear. The last push into England.

Inert and grey now, as though they had been carved from granite.

Lives went on in London. A decades-old blitz spirit had settled over the city: vegetable gardens on rooftop terraces, classes on how to sew dresses and slacks, people pouring free coffee into polystyrene cups from the backs of vans. There were cynics, of course, violent protest, but the mimics were always arms-length away. Skirmishes were about scarcity of resource, not running for your life.

“They’ve been coddled here,” Rita says, far above the crowd.

“That’s not their fault,” Cage shrugs, a few rows behind her on the top of the bus.

“I didn’t say it was a bad thing,” she says, strangely clipped.

The crowd cheers like they’re at a football match for the whole route. Utter, joyful chaos. A celebration less of Rita, and more of luck and life. They all saw the pictures from Lille, from Munich, from Budapest. London knows exactly how lucky it was in this war.

He wrote her a speech, like he did in Paris, gave it to her on little prompt cards to keep in her back pocket. Not word-for-word this time, not dictated in his all-caps American scrawl. When the bus crawls to a stop in Piccadilly Circus - the enormous screens had played the news 24/7 for about four months, and then were switched off conserve power and remain, in uncertain times, blacked out and eerie - just at the mess of roads next to little Eros, and Rita clambers up onto the front seats of the top floor, planting her foot on the jagged edge of the bus’s ripped casing—

She reaches behind her and puts her fingertips on the cards in her pocket. Doesn’t pull them out. Cage’s heart withers. She’s going to ignore them again; a PR disaster, just like Paris.

And then she gives the exact speech he’d intended for her. She must have memorised every goddamn prompt card the night before. The beats are exactly right. She’s loud, and clear, and stirring, and humble. She tells the crowd that they don’t need to fight to protect their lands; they need to fight to restore them.

“I fought,” she yells out, beating her chest. There’s a great, rumbling roar from below. “I still fight! Fight with me!”

She must call it out four or five times more, until some canny soul out there shouts back, _we’re with you, Rita!_ And the crowd takes up the call—

“We’re with you! Rita! Rita!”

Not the Angel of Verdun. Not the Full Metal Bitch. Just Rita.

Finally, not only to him but to the whole world, she’s just Rita.

*

She looks numb and empty when they clamber down the winding bus stairs. Her lips pale and chapped from the cold wind, her hair whipped and raggedy, her eyes tired, darkly encircled. But Cage has seen her dead more times than he can count; she’s beautiful to him whenever she’s alive, no matter how exhausted and raw.

“Find us a drink,” she mutters, and it’s the _us_ that makes him step to it.

*

Probably one in five shops are shuttered - not just for the parade, but for good, as trade dried up and families fled to America - but the pubs are thriving. _Thank God for dear old Blighty_ , Cage thinks, sliding into a dark leather corner booth with a pint of Guinness and a tumbler of Famous Grouse for Rita, on the rocks. She’s still distant, emptied and elsewhere, staring out of the dusky window into the evening as the crowds disperse, merry, her name on their lips. The glass is dirty, but it’s not new: the city has always been grim.

Cage doesn’t mind being quiet with her. He knows he’s nearing the end of his excuse to stay in her company. To sit, silent, with a decent drink is enough.

There’ll be little for him to do when this tour is over. Maybe he’ll be honourably dismissed, turned back into into civilian life, back to help kick global finances into some recognisable shape, get big business back on its lumbering feet; the heart of an ad man with military discipline.

He can still remember his and Rita’s entire route across the beach in France. Every duck-and-under, how many bullets in each direction, how many seconds between each wave of fire. One step, left foot, hop back, right foot. Rita always forgot that backwards step; half the time he had to hold his hand in front of her and push her back.

Cage takes a slow, long sip of his ale, and when he looks up again, Rita is staring at him. Her eyelids low and her gaze casually studious. Her drink has been drained; Dutch courage.

“Did I ever love you back?” she asks, matter of fact.

Cage’s heart punches against the inside of his ribcage like it’s trying to make a grab for her. “We never made it that far.”

She hums, neither agreement or argument; neither derision or disappointment.

There’s no follow-up question.

*

When they go back to their hotel - a real hotel, thick duvets, plush pillows, electric showers, coffee in little sachets next to a plug-in kettle - back to their separate, adjoining rooms, she says, trying to hide how tipsy she is, “Goodnight, Major.”

“G‘night, Rita,” he says, thoughtlessly.

He notices her notice the slip. But she doesn’t say anything. Just nods, then closes the door behind her.

*

One bizarre day, about a month of repetitions into their training schedule, Rita had declined to take Cage at his word. Maybe he was too frustrated, too glib - certainly he turned the morning over and over in his mind while he was unceremoniously dumped into the mimic battlefield for the first time in a while - but when he’d told her, for the hundredth time, that he was her before Verdun, she looked him straight in the eye for much longer than usual, did not usher him along to see Doctor Carter, and instead pushed him back against the wall with her sweat-damp arm at his neck.  
  
“I don’t know where you heard about this,” she said, low and dangerous, “but mock me again-” she glanced at his stripes “- _Major_ , and I will shoot you and see if you still want to joke about it then.”  
  
He wrote that day off. Obviously.  
  
Though the issue never came up again, he began to needle tiny drips of personal information out of her. Nothing obvious or heavy-handed - one unguarded comment at a time was enough to work with - so he had a small library of proof, details she would never reveal to a total stranger and that he couldn’t have gleaned from her files, in case she ever doubted him again.  
  
It was slow going, but Cage, miserably, had time.  
  
She was born in Barnes, moneyed enough to live in a quiet, safe suburb of London. At school she had been sporty and serious, not widely liked but neither bullied - her prowess on assorted teams, netball, hockey, swimming, gained her the protection of respect. She had a better relationship with the men in her life, her father and brother, than her mother, who found her muscular and isolated, with a mannish tendency to bury her feelings.  
  
Her brother had been stationed at Austria, after the razing of Eastern Europe. He had not survived the Mimic charge into Switzerland.  
  
Her mother and father, separated, had moved out of London and both lived mournfully in the North. Her mother had never forgiven her for signing up for the UDF. Her father wrote to her sometimes, but always signed his letter from both himself and his new wife, which Rita could not abide by.  
  
Gleaning this information was like separating sugar and flour. But Cage didn’t find it a thankless task. He liked spinning white lies, taking a fragment of what she’d given him and extrapolating wildly, with absurd assurance, until she got so affronted she had to correct him. She hated giving any part of herself away, but she wouldn’t regret it for long. Cage hoarded her ill-given gifts.

She’s a closed book to him now. Nothing new, nothing old.

*

He assumes the thought wakes him; his dreams tend to be little more than replayed memories these days, his subconscious still not used to the reliable forward march of time. He rubs the bridge of his nose, fumbles for his watch on the bedside table to see if it’s early enough to catch a few more hours’ sleep, or if he should cut his losses and wake up.

It’s barely 2am. Cage groans.

His mouth feels dry. He can’t remember whether the tap water in London’s safe to drink - too many PSAs to remember them all - but he’s sure a swill from the bathroom won’t do him much harm.

He sits up.

Rita is perched on the end of his bed. Her back to him. Instinctively, he glances at her hands: she’s not armed. Her black tank-top camouflages her in the dark. This early, she must still be half drunk; still managed to pick his locked door in silence, a skill she’d know even half conscious. He can’t see her expression from this angle, and it feels immediately vital to him that he hear the tone of her voice. He needs to know how she’s feeling.

“Sergeant Vrataski—” he starts. His throat is arid.

“You’re well-adjusted,” she says, without waiting for him to finish. Her voice is steady, but in a calculated way. Whatever she’s about to say, she’s planned it. “Just—getting on with it. Getting on with the job. After I lost the power—”

“Rita, you don’t need to—”

“Shut up. Let me—let me talk.” She sounds thick-tongued but angry. “I didn’t really know who I was, after it ended. I was just a soldier, you know? Nothing else. Felt like I’d been a soldier for longer than I’d been alive. I got so practised at living the same day. How the hell was I meant to learn a new one?”

He’s never asked her how many days she relived, and she has never told him.

She’s silent for a long time. It feels like she has more to say, but is so unused to speaking this frankly.

“You’re here,” Cage tells her quietly. He’s ready to be chastised again for interrupting, but her silence goes on. He swallows. “You were there with me every day, and you’re—well, against your will, I suppose, but you’re still here. With me. So I—I haven’t really plummeted back to earth yet.”

He shrugs, a little helpless, even though she won’t see.

“When you’re gone, I’m not sure what I’ll do.”

Cage rubs the back of his neck. He realises with a start that he’s shirtless, the duvet pooled down to his waist, but it’s dark and she’s distracted and it doesn’t matter. He wants it not to matter.

“I hope you’re drunk enough not to remember this in the morning,” he admits.

“Me too,” she says, dry.

She sits there for such a long time that Cage thinks about reaching across the bed and touching her hand. Just gently, just the one closest to him. He had only ever held her hand as she died, and there’s a low terror in his stomach that if he reached for her, grabbed her hand, the life would ebb out of her palm like it always did, her pulse under his fingertips slowing to a dull jolt, and then to nothing.

But she stands up before he can make his move. She too is in her sleep clothes, just the tanktop and a pair of black shorts. Respectfully, he looks away from her bare legs.

By the time he looks back up into the room, she’s gone.

Cage sits, just breathing, for a long time. Then he gets up, goes to the bathroom, and thrusts his open mouth under the running tap, and drinks, and drinks, and drinks.

*

He was meant to schedule her a TV interview, something cosy and mid-morning. Something for the mothers and retired folk who hadn’t made it out to the parade; a last reassurance that Rita Vrataski was watching over them.

He’d told his superiors apologetically that he hadn’t been able to secure a booking; after her dire performance in Paris, she wasn’t considered chat-show material, and yesterday’s success was too soon to capitalise on. In truth, he hadn’t even bothered calling around.

He knocks on her door too early, before sunrise, and she’s uncomplaining but unhappy: her fingers cradling her forehead as they drive out towards the suburbs, angry at her hangover. Being her chauffeur reminds him of France in a way he’s surprised to find he likes. That two-hour stretch of empty road between the beach and the farmhouse, where they sometimes talked, sometimes argued, sometimes sat in silence like some kind of truce. But it was always just the two of them.

It’s their last day together, and though forced to suppress it for a long, long time, he’s always been a slightly selfish man.

They drive up towards Alexandra Palace. Cage had been there plenty, once he was stationed in London: the ghostly old BBC studios were given a spit-polish and put back to work, that magnificent analogue radio tower considered more reliable in times of war than the digital airwaves that ebbed across the countryside. He found it a grand old dame that held a certain kind of pride in being useful again.

Rita is silent and seemingly unimpressed as they crest the hill obscuring the palace from view. Its dirty cream walls standing upright, decorated like a war hero. Her eyes are dark and distant, as they have been ever since he told her the truth of their acquaintance. She hasn’t mentioned last night, though he never expected her to.

He hadn’t gone back to sleep. Just lay in bed, open-eyed, thinking, ashamed, of that glimpse of her pale thigh. He had fallen in love with her in such a piecemeal way, and it was the fact of it being new more than it being skin - he’d seen her arms and her firm stomach, but never her thighs. He felt like a schoolboy holding a girl’s hand for the first time.

“I hope you don’t expect me to give any speeches today,” Rita says abruptly. Her voice is low and a little crackling, like a split wire.

“No,” Cage smiles. “No speeches.”

She rubs her thumb in hard circles against her temple. “Look—”

“Rita—”

“Last night,” she says.

“Forget about it,” he tells her, immediately letting her off the hook. It’s easier for them both to brush over a misplaced moment of genuine connection, drunk as she was. They’re so close to the end, now. What would be the point of shaking hands, making friends? It’s not like they’re going to end up pen-pals.

He pulls up in front of the Palace. There are still a few UDF Jeeps dotted around, a unit jogging between trees in the park below, barked at by a drill sergeant that reminds Cage immediately of Farell, and a hastily erected watchtower above the approaching road, unmanned now. A curious lieutenant asks for ID, and Cage flashes his stripes, cants his head towards Rita, and enjoys the young man’s wide-eyed recognition blooming, his jerky salute. Rita looks away from his attention. “At ease,” Cage tells him kindly.

Rita follows him at a distance as they leave the car, but Cage walks at nothing faster than a stroll, his hands in his pockets. Dawn is blossoming in earnest now, and from the height of the hill, on a mound where the parkland slopes away steeply, they can see it break across the whole of the city, the same light that dapples through the trees sparking off the distant high-rises, momentarily blinding, a sudden eruption of bright white in the hazy orange-gold wash of the sunrise.

“You did this,” Cage says to Rita earnestly.

She looks at him, that frustrated confusion she’s levelled at him so many times. He’s achingly fond of that look.

“What?” she asks, cynical.

“This.” He nods out towards the vista again. “Kept this city safe. Kept it whole.”

Rita snorts.

“Don’t scoff,” he says, and she seems taken aback by his chiding. “That’s the only reason I brought you here. To show you what you saved.”

“I didn’t—”

“You did. You’ll never know how much you did.”

“You had the power,” Rita says, a note of bitterness in her voice.

“And what d’you think I would’ve done with it, without you?” He laughs, surprising himself. “Died. A lot. I mean, a lot more than I did anyway, with nothing to show for it.”

He lets her look over the city a while, watching for that tell-tale softening of her steely gaze.

“You know, there’s a shrine for you at your old house in Barnes,” he says casually.

_“What?”_

“I almost took you there. I thought you’d be horrified. It’s all teddy bears and wilting flowers and thank-you cards. The owners of the house stopped trying to explain that the Vrataskis hadn’t lived there for over a decade. I guess someone must’ve leaked the address and it became a kind of pilgrimage.”

“That’s—” She makes a face that implies she thinks it’s disgusting.

“That’s why I brought you here instead.”

“Good move,” she admits. It’s maybe the first compliment she’s paid him this whole time.

There’s a long, peaceful silence between them as they watch the sun creep upwards. She really did save this city, Cage thinks, and this country, and this world. Sometimes, in the rose-tinted bleariness before he falls asleep at night, he thinks Rita Vrataski saved his soul. But it’s not the kind of sentiment she’d appreciate.

He knows her too well to tell her that.

He knows her better than he’ll ever know anyone, however long he lives, however illustrious his military career.

He lets himself look at her. She clocks him doing it, but he doesn’t turn his eyes. He just wants to see her, really see her, before he never sees her again.

“Alright,” Rita says eventually, breaking the stillness by shifting her weight. “Come on. What’s next.”

He smiles at her, just with one corner of his lips, a forced tug. “You’re free to go, Sergeant Vrataski. Operation Trident was a success and the United Defence Force thanks you for your participation.”

He salutes her, and she does not respond in kind. His hand falters.

“Enough ceremony. What’s next?”

“That’s it,” he says, at a loss. “You never have to see me again. We can go back to doing what we do best.” He smiles that lopsided, sad grin. “Whatever that might be.”

Rita scoffs, rubs the side of her nose with her thumb. She’s looking away from him, but only with her head half turned; he must be in her peripheral vision still, the way her eyes flit just slightly to and fro. “We’re the only two people in the world who know how the war was won, and it’s not like anyone else is gonna hear you anytime soon, unless you like staring at the ceiling of a psych ward.”

Cage is very still as she talks.

She looks at him properly, and her sturdy, impatient gaze is everything about her he fell in love with. Such a long time ago.

“So you’d better stick around, hmm?” Rita says.

Like it’s the most obvious thing in the world.

*

Yesterday was a long, long time ago, but tomorrow—

There’ll always be tomorrow.


End file.
